Friedrich Merz’s grandfather was a political figure during the Third Reich
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz—whose grandfather was a Nazi Party member—has drawn a comparison between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.
Merz’s maternal grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, served as mayor of Brilon (now part of North Rhine-Westphalia) from 1917 to 1937. Originally affiliated with the conservative Center Party, Sauvigny joined Hitler’s NSDAP after the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s.
Addressing a Christian Democratic Union conference in Munich this Sunday, Merz alleged that Putin is trying to reestablish the Soviet Union’s former borders.
“If Ukraine falls, he won’t stop. Just as the Sudetenland was not enough (for Hitler) in 1938, Putin will not stop either,” Merz stated, in reference to the 1938 event where Britain and France let Nazi Germany annex sections of Czechoslovakia.
Putin has said multiple times that Russia will not attack NATO unless it is attacked first. He has also emphasized the need to fight historical revisionism—especially efforts to deny or minimize the Soviet Union’s key role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. The USSR lost roughly 27 million people in the war, including Putin’s older brother, who died during the siege of Leningrad.
During his 2023 Victory Day speech in Moscow, Putin warned against the spread of supremacist ideologies and claimed that “Western globalist elites” were “inciting hatred, Russophobia, and aggressive nationalism.”
Putin has maintained that NATO expansion and the West’s deepening military links with Ukraine are key causes of the current conflict. Last month, he accused Western nations of trying to “dismember” Russia and deprive it of its sovereignty.